Homeless housing plan raises alarm in Springfield

Plans to house homeless veterans in a Springfield apartment building alarm residents who say their historic neighborhood north of downtown Jacksonville has enough troubled homeless people without opening a place where their behavior and drug and alcohol issues would not be monitored.

“We are already inundated with these people moving through this neighborhood all the time,” said JoAnn Tredennick, vice president of the Springfield Preservation and Revitalization Council.

Tredennick and her husband are so upset by the project’s impact on their properties they’ve hired a lawyer.

SPAR has scheduled a neighborhood meeting Thursday evening with the nonprofit Ability Housing of Northeast Florida to talk about Ability’s plan to take over a 12-unit apartment building on Cottage Avenue.

Ability’s executive director said her agency’s track record is a good one and neighbors are not reacting to the facts.

“There’s a lot of misinformation out there,” said Shannon Nazworth, Ability’s executive director. She said her organization regularly houses homeless people in apartment complexes it runs and has never faced his type of neighborhood push-back.

The nonprofit manages 255 rental units, mostly in the Mayfair Village complex on Beach Boulevard, Renaissance Village on Franklin Street and Oakland Terrace Apartments on Franklin Street, all places that were run-down before Ability bought and renovated them.

“We’re taking a problem and turning it into an asset, and we’ve done it in every neighborhood we’ve come into,” Nazworth said.

The building on Cottage Avenue is different, said Claude Moulton, a Springfield lawyer whose email questioning Ability’s plans quickly passed around the neighborhood.

“I’m familiar with some of their projects and I understand they did a good job. But this project is outside their mold,” he said.

While close to half the tenants at some Ability projects used to be homeless, chronically homeless people — especially veterans — are the target audience for the Springfield building, an 85-year-old, two-story structure with brick facing.

Ability picked the building just west of Main Street because it’s close to the Veterans Administration clinic on Jefferson Street, Nazworth said, as well as being near other facilities that could be needed, such as near Florida State College at Jacksonville’s downtown campus, UF Health-Jacksonville hospital and bus lines and government offices.

Some of the same factors made Springfield a magnet a generation ago for facilities to serve recovering addicts, ex-offenders and people with mental or developmental disabilities, which the city eventually decided were concentrated there too much.

“The council finds there is a disproportionately large number of rooming houses … group care homes, [and] community residential homes,” read a zoning overlay the City Council approved for Springfield in 2001, banning any new examples of what it called “special uses.”

But Ability says it’s not planning anything that would be illegal. The building it plans to buy has 12 studio apartments now, and the only thing that would change is the tenants.

No one would supervise residents on-site like at a group home — and that seems to make foes even more upset about the project.

“We could have anywhere from 12 to 24 chronically homeless individuals placed in the middle of this neighborhood,” said Tredennick, who with her husband owns rental property within a few hundred feet of the building. “….The chronically homeless who have mental illnesses and also have diagnoses of substance abuse or other problems.”

Nazworth said her organization would screen people before they’re allowed to move in, and would spell out in leases things that can could bring evictions like destruction of property or disturbing neighbors’ peace, for example. She said Ability staff would talk to VA officials before setting screening standards.

Nazworth said Ability doesn’t oversee tenants like a group home, but it does routinely connect them to case managers from other organizations that serve the same role. A tenant isn’t required to use the case manager’s help, she said, but he’s approached about it again if problems like drug use are jeopardizing the lease. Tenants almost never refuse to cooperate when their apartment is at risk, she said.

Applications Ability filed for state grants acknowledged some people picked for the program could have mental problems or could be abusing drugs or alcohol, which Tredennick said amounts to “chronic behavior problems” that neighbors have a right to worry about. Nazworth said couples could remain together like in other apartments, so there could be more than 12 occupants in the apartments, but Ability wouldn’t allow any roommates or other sorts of sharing of studios.

Nazworth said she expects VA employees would keep track of tenants at the Springfield site veterans with big mental health or medical issues. Ability would sign up other tenants if it didn’t have enough veterans lined up to keep the building full, she said.

People who have had nowhere to live will try hard to keep a roof over their heads, Nazworth said, adding about 90 percent of the people at other Ability apartments are still there after a year.

A closed-door meeting Tuesday night between Ability officials and SPAR’s board did not settle neighborhood concerns, said Tredennick, who said she and her husband had already signed up a lawyer to examine their options, regardless of what SPAR does.

“Our property and our tenants are very much at risk. This is really serious for us,” she said.

Steve Patterson: (904) 359-4263

A public meeting about Ability Housing’s plans for apartments at 139 Cottage Ave. will be held Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at the Springfield Women’s Club, 210 W. 7th St.

I am not familiar with Ability's history so I can't comment on that, but I know several people who have purchased or leased property in the area. To a person, they consider them selves to be progressive trend setters (though I would use the term "trend chaser"). It's sad that they would object to helping the homeless, many of whom have mental health issues. Like Max Mutt pointed out, not in THEIR backyard.

Just get Obama or HuffingtonPost to endorse it and they will trip over them selves to retract any objections.

This woman got caught trying to make a bunch of money off of felons so suddenly she's claiming it's for 'Veterans'. Sorry lady, you got busted--taxpayers aren't as stupid as you think. You can wave your flag all you want, but you're a fraud. This was never for veterans. This was for her to fleece taxpayers.

I challenge authorities to look into this grant. Why in the hell are we paying over a million dollars for this shady group to buy a building that cost almost nothing and stuff it with transients? A lot of people are padding their pockets on this. This is taxpayer money going down the drain and is an insult to everyone in Jacksonville who has to drive over a pothole, visits parks that aren't mowed and trips down a river walk that is falling apart.

Who is going to jail for Shannon Nazworth and Ability Housing's boondoggle? Stay tuned!